IN THE ARGENTINE METROPOLIS...

Y ahora...

2006-09-22T12:34:00.000-03:00

"For my next experiment ladies and gentleman, I would appreciate the loan of any small personal object form your pocket. A key, box of matches, a coin - ah, key it is, good sir. Hold it up 10 feet over your head and watch out for the slightest hint of hanky panky... and behold before our very eyes a transformation! We've changed your key into... a coin. What happened to the key? It's been returned to you. Look closely, sir, you'll find the key back in your pocket. May we see it please?"
-Orson Welles

Para mis lectores hispanohablantes, hagan cliki-clik:

La guía mí(s)tica de Buenos Aires.

Back to Babylon

2006-09-14T15:16:00.001-03:00

Lines not written in Buenos Aires:
"I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough."

The Discreet Charm of the Highway Strip

2006-09-12T17:37:00.000-03:00

A few weeks ago, I was driving Route 40 with an alternative energy wunderkind and one of the world’s leading experts on clams.

Route 40 is the longest highway in Argentina, traversing some 4700 kilometers at the feet of the Andes, from Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz Province, to the Bolivian border.

We were traveling in Jujuy, north from the Salinas Grandes to the town of Abra Pampa, a dusty settlement about 40km from the Bolivia. It is a well-kept road of dirt and gravel that cuts a straight line across the arid puna (high desert). To the east lies a chain of foothills, to the west the salt flats glare beneath the Andes. Besides a few isolated homes and a mine, there is little beyond scrub, dry creek beds and alternating herds of llamas and wild burros along the way.

We were in no hurry, but my foot dropped steadily and the speedometer made a slow sweep right, until it bobbed around 110km/hr. I had to slow down to ease through the depressions caused by wash-outs, and occasionally the car would fishtail slightly when sand covered the surface of the road, but otherwise it was smooth going.

Between the desolate landscape and the steady spitting of gravel and dirt against the underside of the car, together with the plume of dust swirling in the rear-view mirror, there was something powerfully hypnotic about blasting down that empty road.

And then the tire popped.

We climbed out of the car, dust greeting us as we opened the doors. Thankfully there was a spare in the trunk, and we replaced the flat in no time.

Pierre, the alternative energy whiz, took the wheel and drove us to Abra Pampa at about half our previous speed. Since we were thinking of driving to a nearby lagoon to see flamingos, we decided that it would be wise to get a new spare. Luckily, no sooner than we pulled into town, we spotted a gomería (tire shop).

The gomero confirmed what we suspected: the tire was beyond repair. For about $20 we bought a badly worn Firestone.

-Nice weather, isn’t it? –the gomero commented once the old new spare was in the trunk. Good small talk, a good way to start a story. It was typical weather he said and, in a few months time, when it was warmer, down the valley they’d be rounding up and branding cattle. And then he and his family would ride mules overnight all the way to Jujuy, to celebrate the festival of San Salvador. There was another festival in Iruya, just over the mountain range. The same mountain range over which the Spanish had come centuries before, the same range where the Yankees had dug their mine. Before the Spanish were the Incas.

-It’s always the same story, he said.

He told me of the bad grass that killed donkeys in the hillside and of the asados they had during roundup time. And a little later, the rainy season would begin, after which crops would be harvested.

Then he made a comment about the dry season, the wind, the dust clouds.

Somehow in thirty minutes he had told me the pattern of life in Abra Pampa from year to year and wove into it the history of the region.

And then he checked the air on our tires once more.

The other back tire was flat.

¡Go!

2006-09-08T21:02:00.000-03:00

If you're in town...
Casandra is like a cool, Argentine version of Ute Lemper.

O my god they’re gorgeous

2006-08-22T12:03:00.000-03:00

The pedestrian street Florida is the ideal place to find leather jackets, cashmere sweaters, and spectacular mullets.

You Shall Know My Velocity

2006-07-27T19:35:00.000-03:00

This afternoon, as usual, I was reading in the least fashionable café in all of Palermo, the Pingüino de Palermo. Several tables away from me, two men were having a conversation. Perhaps inspired by the eavesdropping skills of Chang, the keen-eared cook of Wong Kar Wai’s “Happy Together,” I tried to listen in.

At first, all I heard was “Sarmiento... Mitre... Liniers.”

A conversation about nineteenth century Argentine history?

When I paid more attention, I discovered they were talking about commuter train lines and stations.

I realized something: if you were only to listen to the proper names used in conversations in Buenos Aires, discussions about trains, roads, history, journalism, education, and many other topics would sound the same.

* * *

When I sat down, the waiter greeted me by saying “¿Qué tal, muchacho?”

For an hour and a half I read Ernesto Laclau.

Then I paid and thanked the waiter.

“A vos, viejo,” he responded.

At first, it startled me to think that one can age so fast reading difficult books. And then I became a little sad, considering that I missed the spectacle of everyone else in the restaurant hurtling about at tremendous speeds, while I was busy reading.

Estoy chocho

2006-07-20T13:28:00.000-03:00

I have two of these things on my feet as I write.
Designed and handmade by Ramón Belaustegui, a contertuliano of Viernes Santamarina.
I dig.

http://www.rauchzapatos.com.ar

Aufpassenszuvielenexperimentellentheaterseffekt

2006-07-18T17:52:00.000-03:00

Buenos Aires boasts of more theaters than New York, the newspaper Clarín reported about a year ago. Whether or not this statistic is true is uninteresting; why it Clarín feels compelled to validate this city’s culture life by measuring it against Nueva Zhork is a question worth considering, but it is also one whose answer exceeds the length of a blog entry.

When comparing my private Buenos Aires with my personal Empire City, though, there is no doubt: I see more theater here. Last weekend I went to two shows.

On Friday night I accompanied my former landlady, Nuestra Señorita de los Escupideros, to El vuelo, which she described as a remix of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and The Seagull.

I’m unfamiliar with The Seagull and have a faint recollection of Uncle Vanya, so I can’t speak of the relationship between the work and its inspiration. But I can hazard a guess: neither of Chekhov’s plays involves the entire cast performing choreographed dance moves, playing ring-around-the-rosie and ass-grabbing to techno. This proved mildly bemusing, but the propensity to repeat lines ad infinitum did not.

I am all for a steady drip of verfremsdungeffekt, but this was a bit much. What I took away from this was a sense that the actors must be very close in order to push, kiss, grope, slap, tag and spit on each other so much.

Saturday night, I went with a group to see what I was told was a clown performance. In my mind, clowns all have wigs, red noses, enormous red shoes and are either goofy or murderous.

Thankfully, Cancionero negro did not match either of these mental images. Presented in Absurdo Palermo, a converted warehouse across the tracks in Palermo Hollywood, Cancionero features the androgynous Señor Neptuno who, back from the underworld, reluctantly recalls his lost loves by singing tangos, boleros, and rancheras.

Sr. Neptuno, who happens to be a friend’s, um, former clown professor, sang like a sad, sad, drunk tough guy as he twirled his hands and sashayed like a woman. From time to time he procured from his crotch a bottle of what looked to be Fernet Branca and poured glasses for the guitarist and himself.

What at first was a decidedly odd mix of melodrama and black humor grew on me and, by the end of the performance, it struck me that the show was an ideal way to resurrect songs that have been murdered over and over again by cheesy and earnest crooners.

Little Raging Bull in a China Shop of Horrors

2006-07-18T17:33:00.000-03:00

Recently I went with some friends to El Beso, a milonga on the corner of Riobamba and Corrientes. Coincidentally, it was the first milonga I ever set foot in, as I mentioned in an earlier entry.

This time I was there to dance. Or at least attempt to dance. Perhaps lacking liquid courage, we sat at our table for about an hour, watching partners shuffle around the dance floor in counterclockwise orbits.

It was clear that what they were doing was not what I do in class, but it was close enough and, besides, Stella was getting impatient and starting to goad me.

At last I took to my feet. It was sometime around 1 in the morning, and the place had filled, mostly with well-dressed, middle-aged folk.

Once on the floor, I prolonged the requisite pre-dance chat until nearly all the couples around us were dancing, then, finally, took hold of Stella and started to move.

Like soccer, it’s bad to look at your feet and, in this case, it was impossible. The floor was packed, and it was necessary to take tiny steps, shuffle, start and stop. And for a few, brilliant seconds, I felt an integral part of the mixing, swirling mass.

Then, wham! A shoulder, an elbow, one annoying appendage or another, came into contact with another body, not Stella’s. There was no time to say perdón, and besides, I was laughing too hard at myself to get a word out.

Ink Battles

2006-07-08T21:11:00.000-03:00

As reported on the blog GoodAirs last week, the Argentine press seems to be “toothless” when it comes to the policies of President Kirchner. They lists a number of examples where mainstream media backs off after receiving threats from the government.

Of late, however, the media has been highly critical of the administration’s attempt to push through “superpowers of urgency,” which, as I understand poorly, are like a line-item veto on steroids. (A better explanation is both solicited and welcome.)

Yesterday President Kirchner gave a speech in which he blasted journalists for “lobbying” instead of reporting, failing to check facts, and hurting the his feelings: “¡Qué pena que me dan!” he exlaimed.

The news on news made the front page of both La Nación and Clarín, the capital’s two biggest dailies.

Journalists were predictably indignant and furnished La Nación with enough blurbs for an article that bears the headline “The Press’s Unanimous Rejection of the Attacks of the President and his Wife.” Cristina Kirchner, incidentally, is a Senator.

The comparisons to Perón and Evita were perhaps inevitable, but columnist Pepe Eliaschev went way back, claiming, “The intelectual hero of this government is Juan Manuel de Rosas, the synthesis of the sum of public power.”

Rosas, dictator of Argentina from 1829-52, was indeed endowed with absolute powers from 1835 until the end of his reign. The notion of him as an intellectual hero, however, is highly ironic: as a pro-Rosas poem published in 1830 has it, Rosas has little respect for abstract thinking:

“Of these wise men of the Earth,
Good opinion I don't got...
They're gonna confuse us
with their goddam theories.”

(My translation is intentionally coarse and is meant to be read aloud with a Texan accent that masks an Andover and Yale education.)

What’s more, Rosas himself was personally involved in the editing of the Archivo Americano, a trilingual newspaper that was intended to export a good image of the dictator and his government.

So maybe Kirchner should stop whining and pick up a pen. Of course, then Eliaschev’s blustering would have real substance.

¡Qué quilombo!

2006-05-18T11:43:00.000-03:00

Quilombo is word I try to use whenever in impolite company. It is somewhat less delicate than “a mess,” but just as common; perhaps a touch gentler than “a shitstorm,” which is an unjustly neglected word in English.

It is a word of African origin that came into lunfardo, the old school, urban slang of the River Plate, by way of Portuguese. Originally it meant “brothel.” There is probably a very good story, now forgotten, that initiated this shift in meaning from “brothel” to “mess.” Use your imagination.

It is in the quilombos at the end of the 19th century where that emblematic dance of Buenos Aires emerged, and not surprisingly, it too took on an African word passed on from Portuguese: tango.

Originally turned off by all the strutting and phony seductiveness of shows and street performers, I had no interest in trying to learn tango. It seemed a nostalgic, stilted recreation of something that in its origin was spontaneous and sordid – and apparently danced by only men.

Then a few friends took me to a milonga in the center. Not a glitzy place, not one of the famous milongas. There was a small, square dance floor, surrounded by tables. Most people were in their fifties and sixties. A few younger, quite a few a bit older.

As the music started, couples took to the dance floor, mulled around, chatted and finally, as the rhythm kicked in, they began to dance. There were no leg kicks, no sequins, no smirking beneath a fedora. None of that. In fact, the most noticeable thing was not visual, but audible: feet sweeping and scraping across the wooden floor. And, man, some of those viejitos had style: eyes closed, faint grins, small, precise steps and spins.

That I wanted to learn.

A few months ago, my Italian friend Enzo invited me to a class in a bar in Palermo. I was a bit apprehensive, but it turned out to be an unpretentious, friendly environment. Carlos, the teacher, is a warm, hyperkinetic man in his late 50s with bright blue eyes and floppy white hair. He taught me some basic steps and then passed me off onto an extremely patient girl.

Each class I spend a few tangos trying to remember what I learned the last class and have forgotten over the course of the week and then, once I get comfortable again, Carlos or one of my dancing partners gives me some advice, perhaps teaches me a new variation.

I still have a long, long way to go before I can consider myself a proficient dancer. But even now, even with basic steps and a fair bit of fumbling, I feel it.

Last Friday I had some folks over and, as the bottles of wine emptied, what started as a mellow party degenerated into a quilombo. No, not a house of ill-repute, but a vibe with just a touch of descontrol. Someone put on a CD of Pugliese, pushed my dining room table aside, and we were off:

Borges y yo

2006-05-15T20:31:00.000-03:00

I just read Larry Rohter’s travel piece on Borges’s Buenos Aires, which was published yesterday in The New York Times. It is of course impossible to mention in a 2000 word article every bit of Buenos Aires with which Borges came into contact, so I thought I’d mention a few more. Also, I’d like to clarify a few points where he was less than precise.

Rohter says that “the Borges family's Palermo homestead still exists, at Serrano 2135, but it is not open to the public and there is nothing to mark Borges's passage there save for a small plaque.” This is a little vague. "Homestead" is a euphemism for "there is now a blah brick chalet-style dwelling where Borges's home once was." I recently saw an ad in the window of a realtor’s office – you can buy this piece of not history, apparently.

Also, a quick note on the street whose name was changed to honor Borges. Borges, in his poem “La fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” (“The Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires”), invokes the block where he grew up:

La manzana pareja que persiste en mi barrio:
Guatemala, Serrano, Paraguay y Gurruchaga.
(The very block that persists in my neighborhood:
Guatemala, Serrano, Paraguay y Gurruchaga)

So, as my landlord Almirante pointed out, the bureaucrats who wanted to honor Borges ended up ruining his poem. Like the South Side residents in Toni Morrisons’s Song of Solomon who stubbornly refer to “Not Doctor” Street, many locals insist on calling the street Serrano.

If you’re interested in visiting a structure that Borges may actually have lived in, go to the Casa Azul (Tucumán 844), which now functions as a theater a la gorra (pay as much as you want). There are not one but TWO plaques honoring Borges’s residency there. The American equivalent to such nonsense is the “George Washington Slept Here” phenomenon.

Rohter mentions the lovely Plaza San Martín, near where Borges spent most of his adult life. The Kavanagh is an iconic art deco skyscraper that stands at the eastern end of the plaza. Borges hated it so much that he described it as “that tall prism that dominates the estuary whose waters are the color of the desert” and a tower “that notoriously combines the detested whiteness of a sanatorium, the numbered divisibility of a prison and the general appearance of a whorehouse" in his story “La muerte y la brújula." (“Death and the Compass.”)

The “Biblioteca Nacional” that Rohter mentions is no longer the Biblioteca Nacional. The current Biblioteca Nacional is an architectural monstrosity located in Recoleta, so ugly that it is worth seeing. I wonder what Borges had to say about it. (Not Rohter’s fault, but this is the library listed on the linked page).

Lastly, though Rohter talks about how Borges loved to walk through Buenos Aires, he doesn’t mention “Sentirse en muerte,” a piece in which Borges describes a stroll from Barracas to his neighborhood of Palermo. A serious walk, halfway across the city. It can be found in the collection El idioma de los argentinos. It is an itinerary this flânuer will soon follow.

Autumn Leaves

2006-05-11T13:16:00.000-03:00

Proust, that famous vago, said it best:
"Je ne regardais en somme tout cela avec plaisir que parce que je me disais : « C'est joli d'avoir tant de verdure dans la fenêtre de ma chambre»"

Y la vuelta vamo' a dar

2006-05-10T12:49:00.000-03:00

Sensible Argentines and guidebooks alike tell you that you should never, nevereverever, watch an Argentine soccer game from the tribuna popular – the section of the stadium where the barras bravas (fan clubs) chant, dance, curse and jump for the duration of a game. On the Sunday night news, the recap of games frequently shows images of fans fighting the police, fighting one another, lighting flares and climbing the fences and screens that cage them like animals.

But after watching and hearing La Doce, the famed and feared hinchada of Boca Juniors from a seat in the platea (the seats) a few weeks ago, I knew I had to experience it up close.

Naturally, it was something I wouldn’t do alone, but luckily two visitors – two petite, blond American girls were willing to ignore the sensible advice they too had heard.

On Sunday Boca was playing Independiente in the stadium of el Rojo. It was to be decisive, because Boca could clinch the league championship with one game remaining in the season.

We arrived in Avellaneda – the town just south of the capital where both Independiente and their archrival, the beleaguered Racing Club play in adjacent stadiums. The walk from the train station was lined with police in riot gear who, at one intersection, held us up as they let fans of el Rojo head towards their separate entrance.

After being patted down on three separate occasions, we entered the stadium and climbed the bleachers. It was an hour to kick off, and the tribuna was already filled to standing-room capacity.

We pushed our way to a spot in the aisle, and there we stood for the next three hours, pressed against and jostled by strangers who, in the end, reacted to our presence with bemusement and graciousness.

Thirty minutes before kick off, the chants began, interspersed with taunts and insults to the hinchada of Independiente – a swarm of red who returned the songs and puteadas with equal passion.

Ten minutes to kick off, a guy standing next to us turned and shouted to us: “The songs are easy to learn.” He was already hoarse.

And as the teams took the field, I could feel the concrete bleachers vibrate from ten thousand pairs of feet, and the voices of those who surrounded me overwhelmed my ears with a song that hasn’t yet left my head: Boca, mi buen amigo / esta campaña volveremos a estar contigo... (Boca, my good friend, / this campaign we will again be with you).

When Boca scored its two goals, we were caught in an avalanche of bodies rushing towards the field. As I was picked up and pushed forward, I saw the drink vendor go head over heels, his upended tray showering us with Coke.

After their victory (2-0), the Boca players gathered at the goal in front of the tribuna and joined the fans in celebrating their second consecutive league championship. Pato Abbondanzieri, the goalkeeper, scaled the thirty-foot fence and sat on top of it, bookended by fans, and sang, shouted, and pumped his fists (see picture).

There is simply no equivalent in the States to this outpouring of passion and semi-controlled chaos. It is a spectacle that is horrifying and beautiful all at once, and to be in the middle of it – fully aware of the many things that could go wrong – produced both a sense of individual insignificance and a delirious illusion of belonging completely to something epic.

Amores perros

2006-05-02T18:46:00.000-03:00

Pedaling through Recoleta, I saw a man move his way slowly down the street, surrounded by a pack of domesticated dogs.

Immediately I hopped off my bike and snapped a couple of pictures. Finally I had captured on film a sight that is as much a part of everyday life in Buenos Aires as dodging dogshit: a paseador de perros.

I asked Mario if he ever had problems with the dogs. No, he said.

“But don’t they ever get scared?”

“Sometimes,” he said vaguely, eyeing the rigging to which no fewer than fifteen leashes were attached.

We crossed the street. A brutish-looking mastiff stopped to urinate against a utilities box. Mario smacked his head against the metal box, and the group went on its way.

“And do they all get along?”

“Some of them make friends, others no.”

Mario charges 100 pesos a month, per dog for this service.

New York dog owners pay far more to have a dog walker, or even a dog runner, take their pet out, never in the company of more than a few other dogs.

Think of all the money they would save on Zoloft prescriptions, canine psychologists, and acupuncturists if their dogs could socialize in large groups on a leisurely, daily stroll.

Metida de Pata

2006-04-30T11:55:00.000-03:00

Diego Armando Maradona has become a deity in Argentine culture for his left foot, which finds its way into his mouth as much as against a No. 5 soccer ball.

Diego recently appeared in a television commercial promoting a Brazilian soft drink wearing the jersey of the seleção. Imagine Michael Jordan wearing a CCCP warm-up during the Cold War.

In response to his critics, Diego said this:
“All the faggots that are talking now because I put on a Brazil jersey are just that, ‘faggots.’ With the pardon of those people, who I respect very much. That being said, I would never wear the jersey of River [Plate, the rival club of Diego’s beloved Boca Juniors].”

The reaction in the press has been mild bemusement.

¡Lo comimos tutti!

2006-04-26T18:59:00.000-03:00

Il Matterello. Martín Rodríguez 517 - Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Tel: 4307-0529

My folks returned to the States the other day, though not before we shared yet another exceptional meal at Il Matterello, an unassumingly elegant restaurant in La Boca, just a few blocks from La Bombonera, the stadium of Boca Juniors.

The exterior of the restaurant consists of brightly painted sheets of corrugated metal, typical of La Boca (more on this later); the interior is small, bright and simple. When we arrived, about half of the ten or so tables were occupied; by the time our appetizer hit the table, the place was full and there was a line in the entryway. I was glad to have made a reservation.

We were seated at a table by the kitchen, which is partitioned only by a small bar, so we could see the food as it was brought out. A favorite, which I nearly ordered, seemed to be tagliatelle (thick noodles) heaped with fresh arrugula. All the pastas, both stuffed and noodles, are homemade, by the way.

After an antipasto of fresh mozzarella, grilled eggplant, fried zucchini balls, more zucchini with melted parmesan, olives and salami, we dug into our main plates: spinach cannelloni – rich and not too cheesy, lasagna and tagliatelle alla puttanesca. The puttanesca was chunky, such that a different flavor predominated each bite: olive, caper, anchovy.

My Dad kept saying he thought he was in Italy. Might have been the food, but it might have been the clientele: mostly porteños in their Sunday garb, interspersing forkfuls with big hand gestures and exclamations that aren’t all that far from Italian.

For desert: vanilla ice cream with a shot of espresso and beignets with sambayón ice cream, covered in a chocolate sauce, which was so good that a few more bites would have been enough to convince me that I was an Aztec king.

The exact price, I don’t recall, but curiously, my dessert (15 pesos) cost more than my main plate (14). Go figure.

Thicker Than Water

2006-04-22T09:07:00.000-03:00

Photo taken in Café La Biela, Recoleta. My mother smiles broadly, while I, in response to my father's stern admonishment, am saying, "pero, viejo, ¡dejate de joder!"

I Like It Raw

2006-04-21T16:55:00.000-03:00

Argentines are an infectiously passionate people, who love to exaggerate and make extravagant hand gestures. Not only has my bookish, Berlitz Spanish acquired some of the swagger and grit of the River Plate accent, I also catch myself, from time to time, clapping furiously after mediocre concerts and cursing the mothers of pedestrians who step in the path of my lowrider bicycle.

Indeed, Buenos Aires is a city that demands extreme reactions. Its vampiric hours, its corruption, its decadent charm, its infinite cafés, its multicolored buses, its gregarious taxi drivers, its pressurized soda bottles, its beautiful inhabitants – all cheekbones and mullets and feathery bangs – illicit either pure amor or desamor, and nothing in between.

And the meat. Nearly every piece of steak deserves a rhapsodic exclamation, but as these bites accumulate, you reach a point where you need to eat something else, something wholly different.

While spending a long weekend in Mendoza, I met Sadie, a musician and stylist from the Lower East Side. While having lunch in the middle of a vineyard, looking over the haze-gauzed Andes, she told me of an unlicensed vegan raw food restaurant on the outskirts of Palermo Hollywood. As I took another bite of grilled goat, I knew I had to try the place out.

The restaurant, if you can call it that, serves dinner only on Thursdays and is located in the entry hall of an old house a few blocks from the flea market. The floor is black and white tile, the roof is a set of fiberglass slats that open like Venetian blinds.

Iago, the chef, is a quiet but outgoing Argentine who spent three years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he learned to cook... or not to cook vegetarian cuisine. Maite, his companion, is Uruguayan, as is Luz, their gentle yellow lab. The two of them made our sobremesa (after-dinner conversation) extremely agreeable.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After an overwhelming asado in San Isidro a few nights before, I was looking forward to something wholly distinct. Iago did not disappoint: we started with a cold soup of pumpkin, Brazil nut milk and a few drops of Tabasco; next came a salad of wild greens, pears and avocado; the main course was a spinach torta with a crust of dehydrated quinoa and flax seed; for dessert we ate a small glass of banana purée topped with a carob sauce. This was not penance for eating steak; this was a celebration of fresh ingredients, the yang to steak's ying.

To drink we had a bottle of organic tempranillo. Empirical evidence suggests the ecological cultivation of the grapes has no effect on the sluggishness that red wine produces the following morning.

Sometimes meat-lovers snort when people describe this kind of food. My new response: they haven’t eaten enough Argentine steak.

Chinese Tapas, or Spanish Dim Sum

2006-04-21T16:05:00.000-03:00

La Cabrera. Cabrera 5099 - Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Tel: 4831-7002
La Cabrera Norte. Cabrera 5127 - Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Tel: 4832-5754

When I find myself in one of those tiresome conversations about “favorite ethnic cuisines,” I invariably mention Korean food. My reasons are several: I am usually the last to opine in these exchanges and chances are good that someone has already said “Mexican” or “Vietnamese” or “Thai” or whatever; kimchi is delicious; and, most importantly, even if I can’t tell you what they contain, I love all those little dishes that accompany your order in a Korean restaurant.

A friend of my, when pressed to describe a tapas bar, described it as “Spanish Dim Sum.”

In the same way, La Cabrera and its annex, La Cabrera Norte, can be described as parrillas argentino-coreanas, because your grilled meat comes with an array of bowls containing all sorts of goodies: applesauce, roasted garlic in balsamic vinegar, grilled eggplants, mushrooms in a Malbec sauce, green olive tapanade, and a few other things I can’t recall.

A few months ago, I ate at La Cabrera with my “Spanish Dim Sum” friend, who, not surprisingly, also enjoyed the little dishes. Despite a religious prohibition on beef, we ate extremely well: a provoleta (a grilled wheel of cheese), bondiola de cerdo (pork loin) and pamplona de pollo (stuffed chicken breast).

The other night, I went to eat with my folks and a friend, and were sent to the nearby La Cabrera Norte because the corner restaurant was full. Though the interior of the annex is a little less elegant, the service is just as good and the menu is identical. We split a caprese salad, a chorizo, a brochette de lomo and an ojo de bife (a boneless ribeye). With this we had a few bottles of Lurton Malbec Reserva. Dessert was dulce de batata (sweet potato) and cheese and a “chocolate volcano.” Complimentary glasses of champagne accompanied them, as well as a glass of a dessert wine made with Bonarda.

I am currently inventing pretexts for an imminent return.

Now Even Less Content!

2006-04-12T11:53:00.000-03:00

A few weeks ago I went to the Academia Nacional de la Historia, where I spent the afternoon reading articles from 1837-38 published in El Diario de la Tarde. The advertisements proved to be nearly as interesting as the content of the paper:

Here is an ad for a milk-bearing goat:

A bilingual ad for a cook:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, tortoise shell peinetas were in style at the time:

Slavery was also a part of everyday life in 1837. This ad reads: "Yesterday, at about 11 in the morning, a little black boy named Claudio fled from the house of his masters. He is roughly 10 years old, stocky and thick-lipped with big eyes and buck teeth and was wearing a jacket of thick, black wool and canvas leggings, is barefoot and hatless; whoever gives news of his whereabouts, and brings him to Perú No. 43 (prev. la Florida), will receive said award."

Disaster Narrowly Averted

2006-04-09T11:08:00.000-03:00

Biking in Buenos Aires is perhaps a bad idea; biking and wine-tasting in Mendoza is surely worse.

But it was a beautiful day and the image of pedalling through vineyards was too appealing not to try it out.

Both the Napa and Colchagua (Chile) Valleys boast of wine trains. Mendoza can proudly claim the wine bus: the 10 line crawls through the southern part of the city, before twisting and turning through the wine-growing region of Maipú.

However perilous combining cycling and degustation may sound, “Wine and Bikes” is an outfit that facilitates such foolishness. You take the 10 bus to the Plazoleta Rutini in Maipú. There, unafraid of lawsuits, they provide you with a bike, no helmet, and a map plotting a 24km circuit that has stops at 6 or 7 bodegas.

At Bodega La Rural, the first winery, providence intervened in the form of a lanky Belgian from my hostel and an Israeli woman he had met on the bus.

After tasting a couple of glasses of mediocre wines, the three of us decided to have lunch at Casa de Campo, a little restaurant 50 meters from where I had rented the bike. The menu featured three entrees and 5 pages of wines. We all ordered colita de cuadril with a malbec sauce (pot roast, Argentine-style) and shared a bottle of Trapiche Fond de Cave Malbec. Both beef and wine were delicious.

As our sobremesa stretched into the late afternoon, we ordered dessert: fig ice cream, served with candied figs and cognac. Instead of a meager dribbling of liquor, we were surprised by an entire bottle that the amenable host set on the table. The combination of fig ice cream and cognac was unexpectedly tasty, and some of the cognac found its way into our empty glasses.

At this point you could nearly call it evening and the topic of conversation ping-ponged between exclamations of a deep self-satisfaction and compliments to the chef.

We weren’t done yet, though. We asked for the bill and a taxi at the same time and, within a few moments, were speeding down the narrow, tree-lined highway that I had intended to bike.

The wine-tasting ended at the charming Bodega Familia DiTommaso, a family-owned winery whose cellar dates from 1869 (see photo above).

¡Oh Solomillo!

2006-03-23T15:39:00.000-03:00

Miramar. San Juan, Av. 1999. Ciudad de Buenos Aires Tel: 4304-4261

Doubling as a cornerstore and restaurant, Miramar is a classic bodegón in the neighborhood of San Cristóbal. The look is unchanged from whenever its doors first opened: a tile floor and wood paneling.

As a map of Galicia on the back wall suggests, there is plenty of fish and seafood on the menu, a rarity in this most bovivorous of nations. Octupus (pulpo gallego), a personal favorite, is frighteningly expensive at 65 pesos, but the rest of the menu is fairly reasonable.

There are, in fact, two menus: a wooden board that circulates around the room, which has the specials of the day and a menu of more standard fare.

Last Thursday, the plates of the day were the following: besugo (fish), merluza (ditto), rabbit, pork tenderloin, and one or two other things that I can’t remember.

Unfortunately, they were out of the rabbit, so I settled for pork tenerloin (solomillo), which was huge, delicious, and served with apple sauce and sauerkraut. I don’t think that’s a typical Galician dish, but I don’t care.

Moira, who had been kind enough to accompany me all the way across town, had the merluza, which was served in a ceramic dish, big chunks mixed in with onions and potatoes.

For dessert was mamón con queso: canned papaya with cheese. Should have gone with my standby dulce de membrillo (quince paste) with cheese, but that’ll have to wait until next time.

A meal for two (two main plates, two desserts, and one café con leche) cost $60 (US $20). Not a steal, but well worth it.

Biking in Buenos Aires

2006-03-23T15:11:00.000-03:00

To those of your familiar with local driving habits, biking in Buenos Aires may sound like a very bad idea.

On the other hand, the city is mostly flat and vast, so getting around on two wheels makes a lot of sense. Additionally, there are a few places where biking is ideal: the Costanera along the River Plate, the Ecological Reserve in Puerto Madero, and the Bosque de Palermo.

I didn’t buy a bike immediately. First I took a tour with La Bicicleta Naranja, an outfit in San Telmo, which, as it name suggests, rents orange bicycles. On a Sunday morning, I joined a group of Argentines, mostly from the province of Buenos Aires, and a guide. We did a big, slow loop of San Telmo and downtown, before visiting the National Immigration Museum.

For the next few weeks, I shopped around and observed the streets. It being summer, I noticed plenty of bikers.

I took a look at some used velocipedes at two bicicleterías that are located on the corner of México and Tacuarí (Monterserrat/San Telmo). For about $120 (US $40) you can buy a beater. Ugly and barely functional, but cheap. Another shop in San Telmo, directly in front of the Parque Lezama and the Museo Histórico Nacional, sells new and used bikes.

Ultimately I bought myself a new, chrome playera – a beach cruiser, for $225 (US $70). The frame was a little small, so for an extra 5 pesos, they put on chopper handlebars. My chrome is shining, just like an icicle...

So the bike is pretty sweet, though I’ve had a few problems with the chain and have, in the course of six weeks, had five flats. Last weekend the bike mechanic declared that I was cursed. Then again, the cobblestones on the last few blocks before I reach home glitter with broken glass.

Still, the playera is an enjoyable way to get around the city. You quickly learn to avoid big avenues without bike lanes (most of them) and the narrower streets that have a lot of bus traffic (like Marcelo T Alvear / Charcas). Sunday, I have discovered, is the best day to ride because the streets are nearly empty.

The web site of the City Government has a map with bike lanes (carriles preferenciales) and bike paths (bicisendas).

The sweetness of my bike, I should add, is completely annulled by the fact that I wear a helmet. This makes me an enormous dork. At last count there are four of us who wear helmets while biking in the city. Which makes some sense, because no one wears seatbelts, either.

Beware of the Wobblies!

2006-03-17T11:07:00.000-03:00

Rubí, a pocket-sized friend from Valencia, once called Buenos Aires as the “City of Dancing Flagstones.” Her description is not only poetic, it is true: instead of poured concrete, the sidewalks of the metropolis are lined with flagstones that over the course of time chip, crack, and wobble.

As the fiercely devoted readers of these chronicles will recall, Buenos Aires loves to imitate Paris. Beyond the big lines of sight of Haussmann-inspired boulevards, these cities share another common feature: the sidewalks are dotted with dogshit.

Taking these two factors into account, you are advised to step deftly when en flânant dans les rues of Buenos Aires.

After a heavy rainfall, you need to be especially cautious. (And, as I write, it has been raining two days straight.) Within a few days of my arrival here, I stepped on a teetering flagstone, which sent a jet of blackish water upwards, soaking my shoe and covering my pant leg.

Then it happened again. And again. There is a 72% chance that it will happen tomorrow.

The other night I was having dinner with some folks at the Club Eros. The Club Eros is not what its name suggests, you pervert, but an old athletic and social club in the middle of über-hip Palermo.

A new acquaintance and I transitioned nicely from small talk about weather to the dancing tiles of the city.

And like a good porteño, Fede started to sing a tango:

Igual que baldosa floja,
Salpico si alguien me pone el pie
(Just like a loose flagstone
I splash if you step on me)

Up and Up

2006-03-13T16:57:00.000-03:00

Sitting at a café, I discovered on the table before me a copy of La Nación, the stuffy, venerable daily founded by the historian, military man, and President Bartolomé Mitre in 1870. Though it is not my newspaper of choice, I am fond of reading and, to paraphrase Cervantes, will pick up anything, even torn papers found on the street.

On the back page of the first section, there is an article whose headline reads: “In the last 30 years, Buenos Aires has lost 30% of its homes.”
A few paragraphs down one realizes that the headline is a bit sensationalist. It is not that Buenos Aires is suffering a massive housing crisis, rather 30% of one or two floor dwellings have disappeared and been replaced by apartment towers over the past three decades. How this matches up with a other big cities, I’d like to know.

The article cites the middle class neighborhoods of Caballito, Villa Urquiza and Palermo as the areas that have seen the most growth.

In Palermo, the neighborhood where I am living, the bristling line of high-rises that begins on the Avenida Santa Fe is quickly overtaking autoshops, compact “chorizo” houses and newer brick chalets. Realtors for some time now have taken delight in subdividing the neighborhood with aspirational labels. Palermo Viejo has experienced a speculative mitosis and contains Palermo SoHo and Palermo Hollywood.

Billboards that conceal the ground level of construction sites display glossy, computer-generated images of the building-to-come whose accompanying text touts the future structure as a sound investment. Whether or not these are enjoyable places to live is taken for granted.

The article in La Nación interviews the spokesmen of several construction and real estate associations, who worry that the city’s infrastructure won’t be able to keep up with the rapid growth that is regulated by a building code they feel is restrictive.

An editorial piece titled “An Acceptable Tendency” accompanies the article, which encourages the continued build-up, though offers a word of caution: vaguely alluding to “scientific” studies, the author warns us of the psychological damage that children suffer from splitting time between a twentieth floor penthouse and a weekend country home. Apparently they develop antisocial behavior. If only we all could.

Una cubana grossa

2006-03-09T20:06:00.000-03:00

To learn more about mullets (aka "cubanas"), click here.

Barracas

2006-03-07T09:11:00.000-03:00

This quiet corner of Barracas, a neighborhood adjacent to La Boca, is sandwiched between railroad tracks and an elevated freeway. A number of years ago, the painter Marino Santamaría decided to paint his house with bright colors and playful patterns. Neighbors liked it so much, I guess, that now most of the houses on the pasaje Lanín and a few surrounding streets have similarly flamboyant facades.

Last year I went halfway across town to visit my favorite barber in Buenos Aires: Román Lamas, a fourth-generation barber from Galicia who has been cutting hair at the same locale (1991 Suárez, Barracas) for nearly 50 years. After cutting my hair to Wagner, he took me outside and showed me around.

On Sunday I went back, armed with a camera.

The Café of Babel

2006-03-05T22:38:00.000-03:00

I was sitting in a café in Palermo, reading the Sunday magazine of Clarín, Argentina’s largest newspaper. Included in the magazine was an article dedicated to the profusion of English words that have found their way into Argentine Spanish. Many, like brainstorming, public relations and workshop predictably come from business; others, like ambient, cool, fashion, and top, probably find their way into the language through television and movies. Argentines, both in the press and in conversation, banter these words about, sometimes replacing perfectly functional Spanish words in what is often an unconscious attempt at sophistication.

On this note, I should mention another category as well: words and phrases that are used in a different context or not at all in English: for example, after beach, flash and SMS.

Now, before you accuse me of being a linguistic purist, à l'Académie Française, let me point out that 1) I naturally have an unfair advantage in this game and 2) there are certain foreign words – much like grapes when transplanted to a different climate – that acquire a richness in their new environment. For example, though I find it silly to say fulltime instead of a tiempo completo, there is no one simple translation for the particularly Argentine expression a full, which can mean totally, all out, completely, full, nuts, etc. Full, incidentally, didn’t even make it into the article, probably because it’s so commonly used.

Additionally, we English speakers have long been guilty of this, at least since 1066 and probably before. In more recent history, H.L. Mencken dedicates a big chunk of his The American Language (1921) to presenting foreign borrowings as evidence that Americans have bettered the British tongue.

Then again, if you ever catch me saying “Let’s have a little après-ski,” please shoot me.

Anyway, so I was sitting in this rather fashion café in Palermo when a middle-aged woman and her father sat down a few tables away from me. After squinting at the chalkboard at the other end of the restaurant, the woman announced:

“I’m going to order a frappuccino.”

“A what?” asked her father.

“A frappuccino,” she replied. “You know, it’s like a cappuccino. It’s like a mocha, but a mocha has chocolate.”

Her father looked puzzled.

“They serve them at Starbucks. Star-bucks.”

The poor old man looked even more confused.

“It’s a chain of cafés in the United States. It’s named after a character in Moby Dick.”

The name of the book seemed to ring a bell, but, still, the sidestepping definition of frappuccino satisfied neither the old man nor me.

Finally, the waitress approached and he asked for a clearer explanation.

“Es como un cappuccino, pero está frozen,” the waitress said.

The father ordered a cappuccino, his daughter a frappuccino, which is like a little hooded man, but it’s congelado.

*The photo of Claxon Bajadi seen above was taken in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Uruguay, according to the CIA factbook, is also a Spanish-speaking country. And the CIA never makes mistakes.

Reach Out and Touch Faith

2006-02-28T10:37:00.000-03:00

On Saturday night I went with some folks to a nightclub. We arrived at about 1:30 in the morning. It was still early: besides us, there were maybe four people in the place, not counting the bartenders and DJ.

To get inside, we had passed through a doorway with no sign, marked only by a bored, hulking doorman. There was, thankfully, no velvet rope. Down a long corridor, up a short flight of stairs, through an unmarked door.

And there we were: beneath a forty-foot vaulted ceiling, pacing the checkerboard floor of a deconsecrated church.

The pews and the altar have been replaced with a small bar and a platform for the DJ. The ceilings are painted with glitter. There were lots of black lights and, above the exit, a huge screen playing a Morrissey video.

At first, the music was a pretty lame selection of top forty stuff from the past three decades, Stones mixed with the B-52, etc. Then, as people started arriving, the music got focus: The Cure, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, etc.

By three the place was packed, a young crowd that resembled the bands we were listening to.

I kept up a steady, goofy shuffle until 4:30, and then I could no more.

A google search reveals that the locale may also double as a milonga during less vampiric hours.

Well worth checking out, at whatever hour.

Recopado con copas

2006-02-25T21:22:00.000-03:00

Perhaps it is the black Irish in me. I am certain of few things in life, but one of them is that I will never join a temperance union.

Last Thursday I concluded a two week wine-tasting course at the Centro de Enólogos de Buenos Aires (http://www.centroenologos.com/). On Tuesday we had talked and tasted reds, including the burly, Argentine varietal Malbec; on Thursday it was sparkling wines. This was departure for me: I generally limit my annual bubbly consumption to sips from a bottle, straddling the old and new years. So depending on how you interpret the stats, I drink vino espumante once or twice a year.

As to be expected of an effervescent, final class, the mood was festive. Our four wines included one that instantly struck me as really, really tasty – a rare drink-from-a-glass kind of sparkling wine. When it was unveiled, I learned why: it was a Rosell Boher from Mendoza that sells for $150 ($50 US).

At the end of class the four students, two enologists, and one hanger-on gathered at a table and polished off the Rosell.

The two enologists – Juan and Alfredo, both natives of the province of San Juan – invited us to a talk on home winemaking at the Center’s bodega, located in Luis Guillón, a town southwest of the capital.

On Saturday morning, I rode with Juan to the bodega. Along the way, he talked about the disaster that Argentina is (a favorite subject of Argentines, as you might recall from the entry “Necrologistics”) and San Juan’s most famous son, the educator, writer, politician and ladies’ man, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Later, with Alfredo’s collaboration, Juan reminded me how President Sarmiento at one point had a torrid affair with the daughter of his Minister of the Interior, a girl some forty years his junior.

After a brief tour of the rustic equipment in the bodega, Juan gave a talk a handful of aspiring winemakers for about two hours.

I am ready to roll up my pants and start making vino patero with my bare feet, but I will spare you the details of a rather technical lecture.

By the time the talk ended, it was nearly one in the afternoon, so we sat down to empanadas. There were eight of us, I believe: the four attendees; Juan and Alfredo, Juan Carlos Gómez, the president of the Centro; and don Luis, the owner of the property where the Centro has established its cellar.

I had for the first time an empanada filled with mozzarella cheese, prunes, and pancetta. It was so good that for regularity’s sake, I helped myself to a second.

As we ate and conversed, Juan Carlos opened several bottles of wine: first a muscatel made from grapes grown in his backyard in Villa Urquiza, followed by the Centro’s own cabarnet, and finally a homemade sparkling wine made of the same muscatel grapes. There were all very enjoyable, served at precisely the right temperatures, per an enologists’ mania. Of course, I don’t know if they were objectively good, but in the pleasant company of the winemakers themselves, it was impossible not to like them.

Next we ate dessert: the very same muscatel grapes soaked in grappa and homegrown peaches in syrup. To wash this down, the increasingly animated enologists passed around walnut and blueberry liqueurs, limoncello and grappa, all homemade.

Finally, Don Luis, an amiable man in his eighties, took to his feet and made us coffee with beans that he ground as the rest of us continued chatting.

It was barely four by the time Juan dropped me off. I was feeling a powerful urge to take a siesta. As I got out of the car, Juan handed me a biography on Sarmiento called Cuyano alborotador, which I liberally translate as The Shit-stirrer from Cuyo. He promises that it narrates in great detail all of Don Domingo’s romantic indiscretions.

El País Estón (The Stone Nation)

2006-02-23T16:46:00.000-03:00

The Rolling Stones are the biggest thing going in Argentina. As I write, the Stones are probably on their way to Estadio Monumental, where tonight they will play the second of two shows, which sold out instantly.

For the past two weeks, the front pages of every major newspaper plotted the band’s progress towards Buenos Aires. As their arrival neared, the headlines multiplied and their enthusiasm grew, though there were complaints that Argentina, the most estón country in the world, wouldn’t have a free concert like the one in Rio last weekend.

On Tuesday night, when Mick Jagger introduced his bandmates, the response to Keith Richards’s name was so overwhelming that the haggard guitarist fell to his knees in thanks.

Tickets have been selling on the internet from 300 pesos (about $100), so I knew there was no chance I was going to get inside the stadium. Still I had to see part of the spectacle, so this afternoon I headed down to the stadium to see the 65,000 people who were lucky enough to have gotten tickets.

The line stretched for miles down the Avenida Libertador. Everywhere you looked there were big shaggy haircuts and the tongue logo.

I had questions. I wanted Argentines to explain to me why they are such fanatics of the Stones. And being a student of language, I wanted better definitions of the words rolinga (“rolling”) and estón (“stone”).

I first spoke to Darío Logiudice, 34, from Boedo – a neighborhood more associated with tango. He explained to me that he’d been listening to the Stones since he was a kid. For him, the Stones appearance in Argentina was the realization of something impossible; most people thought they’d never return after the economic collapse of 2001. What’s more, he explained, is that “estamos en el 60,” as in, we’re stuck in the 60s. When asked if he was rolinga, he shook his head emphatically, dismissing it as a fashion. “En la vida soy estón,” he said (roughly, “I live as a Stone”). The tongue tattoo on his left shoulder left no doubt.

Next I spoke to Germán, a 42 year-old from Quilmes, one of the outlying cities that forms part of Gran Buenos Aires. He was with his daughters and her friends. They too dismissed rolinga as being a fad, a look. When I asked why they liked the Stones so much, they explained that rock has a long history in Argentina – and German’s been listening to the Stones since he was 8. I took their picture and promised to send it to them. Germán didn’t have an email address, but the kids all did: two of them were piedrarodante_18 (rollingstone_18) and vero_larolling.

At last I approached a group of kids who were furtively passing a joint around. Bemused by the presence of the Berlitz-accented Yankee, they gathered for a picture. I then spoke to Ezequiel, a 26 year old from La Plata, a nearby coastal city. Ezequiel identified himself as a citizen of the “madre patria del rocanroll,” a nation that knows no borders. He and his friends dismissed rolinga as a label. “These kids put on a t-shirt, but they know nothing about the music,” one of them said.

I Found Evita Perón

2006-02-20T18:00:00.000-03:00

Last week, I went to grab a bite to eat with Enzo, an Italian acquaintance. We went to Don Niceto, a neighborhood parrilla that thankfully offers none of the design-happy ambience that is typical of the shiny, capacious resto-bars that have popped up like pimples during Palermo’s growth spurt.
We ate choripan and provoleta, which is a heart attack in the form of a thick slice of provolone cheese thrown on a grill and sprinkled with oregano.
When the restaurant closed, we found ourselves on the sidewalk with two men in their fifties. One of them was a thick, gregarious cab driver who introduced his companion as an historian of the neighborhood.
“Some people write history,” this historiador barrial said, “but I have lived it.”

This, warped by a few glasses of beer and my translation, is the story he told:
My twin brother and I were mischievous kids.
We used to sneak into the Cine Rialto. At least we thought we did. Later I found out that my Dad – who owned a moving company around the corner – had made a deal with the theater owners and was paying for us.
I was seven or eight years old – it was the nineteen fifties. We went to watch a western and, like we always did, we sat in the front row.
We’d seen the movie a couple of times already. Right before the big fight scene, I snuck up onto the stage and, as the first punch was thrown, jumped up in front of the screen. All the sudden I realized I was losing my balance, so I grabbed onto the screen, which tore before it came loose and fell on top of me.
Fifteen years later, after I had been out of the country for a number of years, I went back to the Rialto. The old man that took my ticket asked if I was one of the Pérez twins.
Yes, I said, surprised that he remembered me after all those years.
Come with me, he told me, I want to show you something.
We walked past the seats, right up to the screen. You could see a big “7” in the screen, where they had stitched it back up.
I was the one that tore the screen at the Cine Rialto. That’s the movie theater where they hid Evita’s body.

The story he told, then, was not about making history, but about a close encounter with it. While it is rumored that, after the coup that toppled Perón in 1955, the embalmed body of Evita was hidden behind the screen of the Cine Rialto, it has never been proven. Still, the proximity to legend makes the story powerful, however true or untrue its elements may be. I’m sure that every time the mellizo Pérez tells this anecdote, he can’t but shake from his mind the image of his younger self pulling down the screen to reveal the coffin containing the body of Argentina’s most hated and most beloved woman.

The Raddest Femme Mullet Ever

2006-02-14T22:57:00.000-03:00

Captured while crossing the River Plate, en route to Punta del Este:

Crudites Are Good, Crudités Are Gross

2006-02-12T00:16:00.000-03:00

Sushi Club. ALICIA M. DE JUSTO 286 - PUERTO MADERO. 0-810-222-SUSHI

After our pheasant-ñandú-alligator feast, the venerable Nepalese medicine man Claxon Bajadi and I desperately wished for a return to dietary normalcy.

Raw fish! our stomachs cried. We need raw fish!

As I mentioned before, the sushi at the Asociación Japonesa en la Argentina (see the entry “Lighter Fare”) was pricey and not particularly abundant.

A friend had mentioned a place in Puerto Madero, so we hopped into a taxi and cruised down the Avenida Santa Fe to Puerto Madero, a stretch of brick warehouses lining the set of dikes that forms the port of Buenos Aires, situated directly behind the seat of the government, the Casa Rosada. Yes, the Pink House.

Puerto Madero was developed during the privatization-happy presidency of Carlos “El Turco” Menem and, like this toothy, unctuous politician, it is crassly commercial.

That being said, Puerto Madero is home to some of Buenos Aires’s finest restaurants, including the cavernous steakhouse Cabaña de Las Lilas.

We arrived at Sushi Club at 11:15 pm. The front dining room was packed, and the suspiciously blond hostess told us the wait would be twenty minutes. She offered us egg rolls and drinks: Claxon ordered a Chardonnay; I asked for a Campari and soda. The drinks were unusually meager, but we later discovered they were complimentary.

Scanning the menu, our eyes immediately spotted the option of “sushi libre”: all-you-can-eat for 55 pesos ($18). The menu was a fairly standard variety of nigri, sashimi and rolls, in addition to tempura and a few other cooked alternatives.

Our waiter informed us that tuna was not available, which seems to be the norm, not the exception in Buenos Aires.

We began with a variety of nigri (octopus, salmon, and shrimp), sashimi of the same, and some rolls whose name I forget, but that contained avocado and langoustine and another set with cooked (canned?) tuna.

The fish was good and fresh, and we ordered a second round of salmon sashimi, salmon skin rolls, and some more langoustine rolls.

Now, for those of you seasoned in the ways of American all-you-can-eat sushi, there are three primary rules: 1) stick to low sodium soy sauce; 2) eat as quickly as you can; and 3) leave nothing on your plate, lest you pay a hefty penalty.

The first rule of Sushi Club is that there is no low sodium soy sauce.

The second rule of Sushi Club is that you may continue to order at your leisure until the restaurant closes, at 2 am.

Unlike the stingy rations of sushi meted out at American establishments, our second order of salmon sashimi turned out to be a helping of some thirty or so slices of the most noble of pellet-fed fish.

Claxon and I put up a good fight, but had to leave a few pieces of sashimi on the wooden serving board.

At the table next to us, a rather lecherous man, who was an uncanny cross between Chris Elliot and Jabba the Hut (a rare sighting of an obese Argentine), and his dining companion left well over half of a tray uneaten and seemed unconcerned.

After our server cleared the table and we had paid the bill, Claxon and I stumbled outside and took a walk along the waterfront, admiring the Santiago Calatrava footbridge.

Price: $155 pesos ($51) for two orders of sushi libre, miso soup, and two glasses of wine.

Wild Flavor

2006-02-10T13:01:00.000-03:00

Ummo. Gorriti 4918 (Palermo). http://www.ummo.restaurant.com.ar/

As we are savvy gastronomes, who have developed discerning palates in the cramped confines of New York restaurants, my Brahman medic sidekick Claxon Bajadi and I wanted to eat something distinctive.

We inspected a number of restaurants in Palermo SoHo, which like its namesake is an architecturally appealing neighborhood oversaturated with designer boutiques, restaurants, bars, and “resto-bars,” most of which offer a predictable menu of Argentine dishes disguised with exotic names and garnishes.

At last we found what we were looking for: Ummo, a lofty brick and concrete interior. The walls were decorated with large, loud abstract paintings that I would classify as Crystal Meth Expressionism. The hostess wore a tight-fitting, asymmetrical shirt with a single sleeve.
The menu featured a variety of meats: African buffalo, Patagonian lamb, trout, and vizcacha, which looks like a cross between a rabbit, a gerbil and a squirrel.

After a vigorous debate, Claxon and I settled on an appetizer and two main plates: bruschetta with pickled pheasant, ñandú panzotti (basically big raviolis stuffed with an ostrich-like bird), and yacaré – a South American alligator – in a vermouth reduction sauce.

The pheasant had a rubbery consistency and tasted more like vinegar than anything else.

The homemade panzotti were fairly tasty, though the ñandú meat was mealier and denser than expected. I also found it a bit dry, but the mushroom sauce helped a bit, though it suffered from a zealous dousing of balsamic vinegar.

The yacaré, like most exotic meats, at first bite evokes the cliché “it tastes like chicken,” though the following bites revealed a more complex flavor. The meat had a dense, smooth texture and a hint of fishiness that was not unpleasant. Since my knowledge of reptile anatomy is rusty, and there were no biologists at hand, the amount of small bones in the dish was a surprise to both of us. Despite the fashionable ambience, we ended up eating with our fingers. Just like chicken.

To finish the meal, we decided for a traditional desert and bajativo: chocolate and dulce de leche ice cream and Johnny Walker Black Label.

Price: $149 pesos ($49) for two.

Necrologistics

2006-02-09T11:48:00.000-03:00

Last week I visited the famous cemetery of Recoleta with my trusty sidekick, the Nepalese healer Claxon Bajadi.

The cemetery is located in the center of Recoleta, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of the capital. To the south and the west, a shopping mall and garish nightclubs peer over its tall walls. To the north and east, the balconies of gente de bien look over a fascinating city of the dead, whose ornate crypts line narrow allies, mimicking the density of the surrounding city. (Photos are soon to follow.)

As we made our way through the cemetery, I pointed out to Claxon some of the many historical figures that have come to rest in the marble structures whose dimensions are comparable to those of studio apartments in New York City. Behind iron grates and thick glass, we could often glimpse coffins stacked atop one another. Narrow stairways descend into darkness, suggesting the presence of many more inhabitants beneath our feet.

Claxon kept asking to see the tomb of Evita, so we headed towards where I thought it was.

Soon I realized we were lost. Reluctant to ask for directions, we zigzagged through the southwest corner of the cementerio.

Up against the wall, there was a crypt whose door was open. Inside, a woman in her mid-sixties was sweeping the floor. I stuck my head in the crypt, and asked if she would mind a few questions.

“Not at all,” she said.

It turned out to be her family crypt. The recently deceased occupied the niches on the ground level, the rest nap in the basement.

While we spoke she adjusted the lacy sheet covering her mother’s tomb.

“I come here every week,” she said. “I always talked to my mamita, and I won’t stop now.”

“Do you mind if I ask an indiscreet question?” I asked. I wanted to know how it was that all those bodies didn’t smell.

“The coffins are sealed in such a way that they don’t smell,” she explained.

Now it was her turn to ask a question. She wanted to know where we were from. We naturally confused her: I speak Spanish like a Berlitz tape, and my guess is she suspected Claxon was a Bolivian in designer clothing.

She welcomed us to her country, and then apologized.

“It’s a disaster,” she kept repeating. “Every time someone asks me where the tomb of that Eva Duarte is, I want to scream.”

“Why?” I asked innocently.

“She and her husband robbed this country. She walked around wearing diamonds, giving away things to the poor. This is an ignorant country. We have everything, but our country is a disaster.”

This rant continued for a few minutes until she shifted her sights to contemporary political figures. George Bush and Hugo Chávez, in her opinion, are idiot demagogues cut from the same cloth.

All the while, she rested her hand against her mother’s coffin.

As regular readers of this blog will note (see "What a Wonderful World It Would Be"), extemporaneous political opinions are as frequent in Argentina as steak and dulce de leche.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked Claxon finally.

Claxon smiled broadly.

We introduced ourselves, then said goodbye.

Now more than ever, we wanted to see the tomb of Evita.

I asked a maintenance man where we could find it. He looked at his feet and, without further hesitation, responded: “eleven aisles down, then to the left.”

I imagine that he must at all times keep track of his own position in the cemetery by measuring his distance from the tomb of Evita.

Carne al por mayor

2006-02-02T09:26:00.000-03:00

I cannot exaggerate the importance, both economic and cultural, of meat in Argentine culture. To illustrate this, I provide you the following anecdote:

Yesterday I moved to a new neighborhood. Thankfully I can still fit my continental possessions in a duffel bag, a messenger bag, and two pieces of Irish luggage, so my belongings and I traveled together in taxi.

Halfway between San Telmo and Palermo Viejo, the taxi driver switched the radio off and, as if to apologize, said, "Necesito comprar un gancho de chorizo."

Chorizo, by the way, is more like our "Italian" sausage than the stuff you might have at a tapas bar. I still did not understand what turning the radio off had to do with a large piece of sausage.

Then the driver spoke into his handset, asking the switchboard operator if he knew a good place to buy wholesale meat. The operator confirmed reception of the message, and within fifteen seconds, we knew where to get a gancho de chorizo.

"It's my kid's birthday," explained the driver, "and I'm making choripan." (Please refer to "Minutas" for an explanation of choripan.) His son was turning seventeen. The driver invited me to the party (in the southern suburb of Lanús), but I unfortunately had to decline.

For the next ten minutes, as we cut across the middle of Buenos Aires, the switchboard operator kept calling out addresses of wholesale meat vendors in Caballito, Boedo, Matadero, Avellaneda...

Moral: When you need meat in a hurry, don't consult the yellow pages. Get into a yellow and black car.

Lighter Fare

2006-01-31T16:52:00.000-03:00

Asociación Japonesa en Argentina, Av. Independencia 732

As the account of my meal might suggest (see “Mi Casa es Tu Casa”), Argentine food is quite heavy. Digestion can be snake-like, requiring prolonged periods of complete inactivity.

A few days after my heart-stopping chivito encounter, I decided I needed to eat again, but wanted a change of pace.

Several people had told me about the restaurant of the Japanese Association, always with the same kind of description that make my eyes roll: “It’s where real Japanese people eat.”

I was wary, but the Asociación is right around the corner, so I decided to check things out. One door, closed, displayed flyers for language classes and Noh theater. The other door opened to a long hallway, at the end of which there was a gymnasium. People were practicing martial arts.

Exotic, but not edible.

I asked a security guard if in fact there was a restaurant, and he signaled to a pair of sliding doors with rice paper panes, which had until then escaped my attention.

I stepped inside and found myself in a very non-Argentine space: sushi bar, hanging red lanterns, and, to my mild surprise, real live Japanese people.

As an aside, I should let you know that many dry cleaners in Argentina have names like “Tintorería Tokio.” Surely there are Japanese immigrants and Nipo-Argentines in other professions, though dry cleaning is the most conspicuous one.

Buenos Aires is famously known as a city that turns its back to the sea. This is nowhere more obvious than on menus, where the seafood rarely strays beyond salmon, which is probably farmed in Chile to begin with.

In light of this fact, I ordered the sushi / sashimi combination platter. It was expensive (48 pesos), but well worth it.

A few days later I went back and had their lunch special. For 20 pesos, I had a big bowl of Udon, salad, a few sushi rolls, and rice.

All in all, a delicious respite from the local meat and pasta cuisine.

Mi Casa es Tu Casa

2006-01-31T16:40:00.000-03:00

Chivito uruguayo. “Tu Casa,” Chacabuco 571 (con México), San Telmo

I ate a “Tu Casa” a number of times before I was brave enough to order the house specialty: chivito uruguayo. As I was soon to learn, there was no goat in the chivito, much like there is no egg in an egg cream soda, no grasshopper in a grasshopper pie.

Tu Casa is located less than a block away from my present digs and, with the exception of the chivito, offers standard Argentine fare: Minutas (quick eats), Parrilla (grilled meats), sandwiches, and homemade pasta. The owner is a cordial older man. It is my impression that everyone that works in the restaurant are family members. Thus, the old lady in the kitchen is his wife, the guy at the register is almost certainly his son, and the two teenagers with tattoos on their necks could be his adorable grandkids.

The decor would rate about an 8 in Zagat. I would describe it as retro-functional. For typical Argentine food, it is decent, cheap, and abundant.

On one occasion I had gnocchi with estofado, which I think is pot roast. I am going to need a second doctorate before I can understand the various cuts and ways of preparing meat. Price: $10 pesos ($3.33 US).

The next time I ordered half portions of ravioli with pesto and milanesa de ternura – a breaded, fried veal cutlet. Full portions are presumably reserved for Sonya Thomas, Takeru Kobayashi, Luciano Pavarotti, and friends. I left the “Tu casa” staggering. Price: $12.50.

The other night I came home late and was too lazy to cook. So I stopped Tu Casa. The man whom I presume to be son suggested I try the chivito uruguayo. It had been some time since I’d had a nice piece of goat, so I went for it.

I was a few sips into my beer when the first plate arrived. “This is the cold stuff,” the son explained. Piled high on the oblong platter were beets, shredded carrots, diced tomatoes, marinated palm hearts, green olives, and potato salad. There were gobs of Mayonnaise covering everything.

As I dug into the potato salad, which was quite good, out came the much-anticipated chivito. On a bed of French fries, covered with cheese, marinated bell peppers, a fried egg and a double whammy of ham and bacon, lay concealed a thin steak. A few bites confirmed that it was in fact cow I was eating. Still, it was delicious, so I kept at it.

Defying the quickly growing pressure in my stomach and my arteries, I powered through the steak, leaving only a few fries and some potato salad.

The son looked somewhat disappointed when I told him that I could eat no more, but his face brightened when I told him how much I had enjoyed their famous chivito.
Price: $22.50 ($7.50 US for the chivito plus a 750 ml bottle of beer).

An Homage to Kermit Lynch Or, Brandán Buenosayres Tastes Wine

2006-01-24T19:00:00.000-03:00

2003 Malbec. Don David, Bodega El Esteco. Cafayate, Provincia de Salta, República de Argentina. Price: $13 ($4.26 USD)

Color: When held aloft, Don David twinkles like a "hard, gem-like flame," a turbulent ruby at its edges and a lusty, nearly belligerent maroon at the bottom of my stemless glass.

Nose: The aroma is sneaky. At first, nearly imperceptibly, there are hints of green Chartreuse and marigolds, traced by the whisper of sawdust from the floor of a Shaker workshop. Then the coup de grâce: just as your teeth are set to break the taut skin of a plum, its flesh presses against the tip of your nose and intoxicating, sugary ripeness commingles with a huff of dusty, hot air.

Though you may not possess as noble a Gallic snout as Brandán Buenosayres, rest assured that vigorous swirling induces this olfactory paroxysm.

Taste: An initial smoothness, like dunking your head into a gurgling, moss-matted brook, precedes an ecstatic surge of flavor that sends waves of sensation crashing into your hippocampal formation: sour cherries from a roadside stand, cayenne pepper, the dense, mealy bite of a fresh Cantabrian anchovy, and the final taste of a Wild Berry Fruitsicle as your teeth impress a mezza luna on the wooden stick. At last, there is a deviant soupçon of late-season huckleberry preserves. Each flavor individually emerges, recedes, and blends with the other flavors, like the lingering melody of an exquisite fugue. Swann might have his sonata, but I have my Malbec.

What a Wonderful World It Would Be

2006-01-23T17:53:00.000-03:00

On Saturday I made my way to the Museo Histórico Cornelio Saavedra. The museum occupies Saavedra’s former house and is located in a public park that was once his chacrita – his “little farm” – of 250 acres. This is like calling a spa in Montana a “dude ranch”; the chacrita was a landscaped garden filled with statues and exotic trees.

The property backs onto the Avenida General Paz, which is in fact an expressway that rings the city. It seems like yet another forced attempt to make Buenos Aires imitate Paris. The Boulevard Périphérique isolates Paris from its banlieue; the Avenida General Paz severs la Capital from its outlying suburbs, known collectively as Gran Buenos Aires.

The museum houses a collection of nineteenth century historical artifacts and knickknacks, including ornate, faux-gaucho saddles, weapons, tattered flags, and the enormous, tortoise shell peinetones (see pictures), which must have made elegant porteñas stumble when attempting the newest dances from Europe.

These were pointed out by our guide Jorge, an excitable man in his fifties who exhibited childish delight stepping over velvet cordons to lay his hands on off-limits artifacts. He particularly relished showing us the chair used by the ailing General San Martín while exiled in France. The chair was essentially a nineteenth century laz-e-boy. Jorge showed us at least four times how the seat reclined with the push of a button.

The most memorable portion of the visit, however, took place when we moved into the room dedicated to the Argentine Federation, the turbulent era of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1852). In simple terms, Rosas was the leader of the Federalists, who believed in the rights of individual provinces. Their rivals were known as the Unitarians, who were enamored with European republican ideals and advocated the establishment of a centralist government with Buenos Aires as its capital.

Jorge stood beneath a blood red flag of the Federation that read ¡Muerte a los asquerosos inmundos salvajes unitarios! (Death to the disgusting vile savage Unitarians!) Incidentally, Rosas and his followers typically signed all official correspondence with such slogans.
For the next forty-five minutes, our group listed to Jorge deliver a diatribe that was impressive for both its internal contradictions and its earnestness. Essentially, Rosas was the defender of authentic Argentine culture, while the Unitarians were a bunch of traitors who were too busy brownnosing French and English industrialists and merchants to understand their native land. Substitute “Perón” for “Rosas” and “the oligarchy” for “the Unitarians,” and Jorge might as well have been talkin’ 20th century history blues.

What was most astounding is that I was listening to this impassioned rant in a public museum administered by the government of the city de Buenos Aires. Imagine going to Mount Vernon and listening to a docent explain to you that Jefferson Davis was the greatest American patriot that ever lived because he didn’t buckle to the newfangled industry of the North, which was tearing apart the fabric of true American society.

Come to think of it, things like this happen probably far more than I care to admit.

In any case, Jorge concluded the tour by exhorting “we Argentines” to understand “our” history better. Having bit my tongue throughout the tour, I informed Jorge that I was North American.

You don’t say! he shouted and gave me a big, sweaty hug.

Minutas

2006-01-19T18:35:00.000-03:00

On my way home the other night, I stopped at a small parrilla on Avenida Independencia. I wanted to catch part of the preseason soccer match between Boca Juniors and River Plate, the capital’s two most storied teams. To my disappointment, the TV was set to what seemed to be a reality show.

Still, I was hungry, so I went ahead and ordered a choripan from the woman behind the counter. She spilt a chorizo sausage in half and set it on the large charcoal grill.

While I waited for my food, I took stock of my surroundings. The narrow room was halved lengthwise by the counter. A man was sitting on a stool against the wall, eating a choripan and drinking a glass of red wine and soda water. Above his head a poster commemorated Diego Maradona’s farewell from Boca Juniors.

I looked back at the television. It was, in fact, a reality show, about a woman who had undergone a mastectomy. At that moment, a surgeon was prodding her bare chest.

While the woman from whom I ordered was busy with the grill, another woman behind the counter sat looking up at the television, while breast feeding her baby.

In a country obsessed with a cartoonish form of female beauty, the sight of a mastectomy-scarred chest and a woman feeding her child in plain view is startling. In a restaurant, it is also not particularly appetizing.

“For here or to go?” the cook asked.

I took the choripan to go.

Buenos Aires is Business Casual

2006-01-19T18:29:00.001-03:00

The gaucho, the emblematic figure of the Argentine pampa, wore his hair long and unkempt. The infamous Facundo Quiroga had “a well-formed head, covered with the thickest hair, black and curly," as Domingo F. Sarmiento described him.

As industrialization led to the enclosure of these vast stretches of land, the gaucho disappeared, along with his equally famous haircut.

Though long hair made a sort of comeback with the social movements of the 1960s, decades of military dictatorships and self-serving neoliberal politicians have trimmed away at the unruly spirit of the Argentine people.

In the face of political oppression, though, Argentines have devised various forms of resistance. Men, in particular, have relied on a certain coiffure to retain a vital link to their mythic gaucho forefathers.

In Argentina, the mullet is king.

Yessir: the short-long, the 1090, the business-casual is not restricted to rednecks, hockey players and hipsters as it is in the United States of America. In the Republic of Argentina, the mullet is a haircut that transcends differences of identity. It is so normal, so pervasive, that it is perhaps impossible to rock one ironically.

While a few Argentines I surveyed immediately linked the mullet to bus drivers and soccer players, a few minutes spent in front of an office building in the Microcentro quickly belied these class associations. Suits and short-longs are in no way incompatible.

The mullet, by the way, is known as "la cubana." I aim to find out what is Cuban about this most noble of cuts.